The feeling you get when meeting an ex-partner soon after you split

Tunnel vision. I hadn't spoken to him since we broke up. I hadn't even spoken to him when we broke up. One day I just put down the phone and it was over. Later I let myself in and left the key on the coffee table. No note.

The lobby of a movie theatre I've been to dozens of times before and since wasn't around me that moment. The walls were hollow, reverberating with the hot blush on my face. I felt immersed in burning acid.

He smiled. He was glad to see me. He looked so over me, sitting there over a beer with a friend. A male friend. I don't know what I would have done if it had been a woman.

I came over, I sat down, and for the rest of the conversation I tried to get a cigarette out of the wrong end of the pack. All my energy was directed towards just keeping myself upright and breathing. I don't remember what we talked about.

Take it, take it all, the bed we bought together back when we got our first unfurnished apartment. The kitchen table that arrived self-assembly that we both broke down in fits of giggles trying to put together. The plates, cups, knives and forks. The teapot my mother bought you when she came down to visit us in London. That was our first apartment together.

Memories, these objects are memories and you can have them. I don't want them, don't need them. They're all in here. I carry them with me in a way I couldn't carry the physical things you want to take now, but these images/thoughts burden me just as much.

We talk now, over dinner at some restaurant. We talk in this neutral meeting zone where neither of us need feel too close. In public is best. Where no moments can happen, where no impulses to be held, to want, to feel close can be followed. And that's it, the talk. Talking like we hadn't for a long time. Talking without the need to snap. Asking each other how we're doing. I never knew how you were doing when I lived with you, you never asked me. At the end was only a conflict, the shouts and bitter comments were more silent than the empty house at night when you stayed out for days on end with your friends, avoiding the return home.